Google has just released a brand-new beta of its Google Chrome web browser. As is usually the case, it touts it as the fastest Chrome ever and cites significant JavaScript performance improvements over the previous beta and the first Chrome release. But, unlike the time the Google browser was first launched, it’s facing a much more serious competition. So is Google Chrome still king or has someone else stolen the crown?
We decided to find out with some quick and dirty benchmarks, putting Google Chrome 5.0.375.23 Beta against its stepbrother Chromium 5.0.396.0 (46440), Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3, Opera 10.53 Beta 1 and Opera 10.10. As you can see, it’s a mix of stable, semi-stable and outright development builds so take that into consideration when looking at the results.
All browsers were running on Ubuntu 10.04 on a dedicated, but rather modest machine so don’t expect any record-breakers. Because we’re talking Linux here, there’s no Internet Explorer or Safari thrown in for comparison. We tried to keep the results as clean as possible, but the benchmarks aren’t scientific, by any means. The scores are the median of several runs of the benchmarks. The V8 benchmark was run 10 times in a row, SunSpider 5 times. The colorful charts were created with this nice tool.
Google V8 benchmarking suite
First up, Google’s own V8 Benchmarking suite, version 5. Google developers created the benchmark for their own internal use and it has been made available to everyone. Google’s browsers lead by a fair margin in this benchmark, though, Opera 10.53, which is still in beta on Linux, is showing some pretty impressive results. Firefox doesn’t like the V8 benchmarks a whole lot. As for Opera 10.10, the results speak for themselves.